Jay Carney: “The President…spends a relatively small amount of time campaigning.”
Senate majority leader Harry Reid: “In spite of the conservative obstructionism, we’ve been able to get a lot of good things done. [According to congressional scholar Norman] Ornstein said it was the most productive Congress in the last 75 years.”
A disappointed Matt Damon: “I’ve talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level. One of them said to me, `Never again. I will never be fooled again by a politician.’ You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better.”
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “The national media, which leans a little to the left, I could argue, could smash him [Mitt Romney].”
MSNBC’s Martin Bashir: “But if anyone’s dirty, it’s Newt Gingrich — a man whose personal morality has been drawn from the sewer, a man who pontificates about his Catholic faith and morality but repeatedly commits adultery.”
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “I think it’s really important to know that President Obama was a job creator from day one. Now, was the ditch that we were in so deep that when you’re talking to people and they still don’t have a job, that that’s any consolation to them? No. But I’ll tell you this, if President Obama and the House congressional Democrats had not acted, we would be at 15 percent unemployment. Again, no consolation to those without a job, but an important point to make.”
President Barack Obama of the GOP: “You got their plan, which is let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water, (and) less people with health insurance,”
Vice President Joe Biden: “There’s a lot of people in Florida that have good reason to be upset because they’ve lost jobs, even though 50 some percent of the American people think the economy tanked because of the last administration, that’s not relevant. What’s relevant is, we’re in charge. And right now, we are the ones in charge, and it’s gotten better but it hasn’t gotten good enough. And in states like Florida it’s even been more stagnant because of the real estate market. And so I don’t blame them for being mad. We’re in charge, so they’re angry.”
Joe Biden: “We are in charge. We have turned it [the economy] around.”
Joe Biden, answering a question to a class of 5th graders: “Because things got really bad before we came into office and an awful lot of companies said `there’s no more jobs for you here.'”
Al Gore: “We need to have an American spring, you know, the Arab spring. The non-violent part of it isn’t finished yet, but we need to have an American spring. A kind of an American Tahrir Square. Non-violent change where people from the grassroots get involved again. Not the, you know, not in the Tea Party style.” Just not real grass roots; just not grass roots movements that disagree with him.
Chris Matthews: “Aren’t you worried, though, that in a world where we have to compete with science, in science and technology with Chinese and Indian young geniuses, and some of them move here, and some that are still over in their countries around the world, we’re competing in a world of science and technology to be a country that might be led by someone who doesn’t believe in evolution? Who doesn’t believe in climate change? Who doesn’t believe in the scientific community of his own country, the National Academy of Science, for example, on climate change? Wouldn’t that be kind of scary to have somebody who is so anti-intellectual as president?”
Sen. John Kerry, D-mass.: “I believe this is, without question, the Tea Party downgrade. This is the Tea Party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered even the will of many Republicans in the United States Senate who were prepared to do a bigger deal.”
President Obama told a crowd at a battery plant in Holland, Michigan, that Republicans must “find a way to put country ahead of party.” Then he flew off to do 2 fundraisers.
WH press secretary Jay Carney: “The White House doesn’t create jobs.”
Obama: “My singular focus is the American people. Getting the unemployed back on the job.”
California Gov. Jerry Brown: “I would say that the Republicans are gearing up to destroy the president, that the president will have to respond in a very powerful way, and the result for the country could be calamitous.”
